Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Looking in the Wrong Places

The error we humans make in seeking intelligent life beyond our planet Earth is: (1) we're looking for the wrong sort of thing, and (2) we're looking in the wrong places.

No matter how odd our typical alien appears, they all look like us, i.e., they are anthropomorphic. Even the most bizarre creatures of our movie producers' imagination are anthropomorphized.

They are self-contained, i.e., they have a body, head, limbs, sometimes tails (we humans once had one and still have its vestigial remnant), eyes, usually two, and in the front of their heads, a mouth, often with very scary teeth, and many of the other characteristics common to the human.

Like God, we have created extraterrestrial beings in our own self image.

Given that we have creatures on earth that in no way resemble us, not even in the sense that they have characteristics similar to our own, we should be able to open our minds and consider other forms of extraterrestrial intelligence.

The jellyfish has no brain, no blood, no eyes, no central
nervous system, and some effectively live forever.

Let us suppose, for example, that what we are looking for in the way of extraterrestrial intelligence takes the form of a bacteria. Something called "cyanobacteria" is probably responsible for our very existence. Cyanobacteria somehow showed up on our planet some 3.5 billion years ago and started the process of terra forming (I've written about this elsewhere).

Was this a random cosmological accident, or are bacteria a distributed form of intelligence that travels throughout the cosmos creating the conditions for its own existence, communicating, like our jellyfish, through a neural network like none we've ever conceived?

An artist's impression of the super earth world Gliese 667 Cc.

This brings me to my second point. Recently, a very specialized instrument operated at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has been dedicated to searching for "exoplanets," that is, planets outside our solar system, that have characteristics similar to our own earth. The High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) is an echelle spectrograph fed by fibers from the telescope in La Silla. The whole idea is to identify and hopefully explore planets similar to earth with the hope of finding intelligent life like our own.

But aren't we constraining our exploration by limiting our search to planets? We have no reason to believe that the cyanobacteria that made its way to earth is constrained to a single planet. Maybe the extraterrestrial intelligence we seek is integral to the universe as a whole. Maybe we exist as an infinitesimal part of the whole; an afterthought of a superior intelligence migrating throughout the cosmos in a never ending quest to find an intelligence like its own. And we aren't it.

God, the Universe, Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and all that stuff

A Hubble Space Telescope Photo of the Planetary Nebula NGC 2818

A few days after my birthday in 2009 in a post titled, "The Search for Extraterrestrial Life," I promised to revisit in a future post the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence. Well, the future is here -- whoops! it's gone; we're in the present, or were...

Anyway, if you'll allow me, I'd like to ramble a bit in an effort to describe (explain would be too ambitious) my idea (theory would be presumptuous) about extraterrestrial intelligence. In doing so, I will necessarily touch on the concept of god (lack of capitalization is intended), the Universe, the Big Bang Theory, and stuff like that.

Big Bang Model, NASA/WMAP Science Team

Let me start with the Big Bang Theory, because it's so popular and many of the world's major religions assert that it supports their view of their God and His creation. So here's my take -- I don't buy it. I believe the Big Bang Theory is popular because it conforms with our experiential basis for understanding our own existence. After all, in our world, things have beginnings and endings, including us (our pets, too, which is really sad).

The idea that our universe had no beginning and will have no ending comes and goes in cosmology (kind of like our universe, as you'll see). In fact, no less a light than Albert Einstein initially believed the universe was closed and steady state. But his own General Theory of Relativity required that the universe be either expanding or contracting, so Einstein created a "cosmological constant" to insert in his equations in order to make them conform to his belief in a steady state universe. He later came to see this as a mistake. Well, anyone could have told Albert that, don't you think?

Anyway, where the hell am I going with this. Let me think... Oh yeah, there were other respected astrophysicists/cosmologists who believed in an essentially eternal universe, but the discovery by Edwin Hubble that the universe appeared to be expanding and the further discovery of microwave background radiation predicted by the Big Bang Theory seemed to seal the deal -- Big Bang was king.

Not so fast (although the "singularity" that composed all that existed before anything existed and became The Universe did it in ten to the minus four seconds and that's damned fast). There are other theories of cosmological reality and they are pretty cool, e.g., parallel universes anyone?

Mathematical physicist Neil Turok theorizes that the universe cycles through expansions and contractions (the "Cyclic Universe" theory), and neither time nor the universe has a beginning or end. Google Turok and you can read all you want about "string theory" and "M-theory," and branes, and black holes, and try to figure it all out -- good luck with that.



My own "theory" is that the universe is and has always been, but it's nature changes because it's being pulled in and out of an infinite number of black holes (thus the appearance of expansion and contraction); think about pulling your socks inside out before you throw them in the wash and then pulling them back right side out when you pull them out of the dryer. If you don't wash your socks and want a different example, forget about it you stinker!

I posit this theory because I want you to expand your ability to conceptualize possibilities that are outside the realm of your physical being and your experience as such. Consider this for example, mathematical physicists like Neil Turok deal with many more than 3 dimensions (10 or more sometimes) when they cogitate on the nature of our universe. Imagine how many pairs of special glasses you'd have to wear to watch a movie in 10-D.

Now that your mind has expanded, consider your place in a universe that is infinite and eternal. You may see yourself as floating on an air mattress in a pool, in your backyard, in your neighborhood, in, say, Washington State, in the USA. So, on the North American continent, on the earth, which you may think of as floating around the sun with a bunch of other planets that form our Solar System.

Well fine, but keep going. Okay, so you know about the Milky Way Galaxy. Do you know that the only stars we see with the naked eye are all part of our Galaxy? And that there are an unknown number of galaxies (some say billions) in the universe? That seems really big, doesn't it. Maybe not. Maybe all this is just a gas bubble in the lower intestine of a super being that ate too much dark matter for dinner, and you're a microbe sitting on a piece of undigested fruit, say a blueberry -- our earth -- working with all the other microbes on the partially digested blueberry to turn it into fecal matter (you have to admit, we're doing a pretty good job).

The point is, that in a universe of essentially unknown size, we have no real point of reference for the size of our Galaxy, Solar System, planet, or ourselves. I will tell you this. We are larger than some of the things on this planet that we know about, like bacteria. We're a lot larger than those little buggers.

Again, in an earlier post I wrote about something called Cyanobacteria. This microbe is largely responsible for creating the earth as we know it. An interesting question is, how did it get here? Furthermore, we might ask if it exists only here, or has this particular bacterium migrated elsewhere? Do the bacteria we encounter exist because we exist, or do we exist because they exist?

There is some evidence that suggests certain bacteria were carried to earth on meteorites. The possibility that life first came to earth and indeed, was distributed throughout the universe by ejecta blasted from planets bombarded by huge meteors has spawned a theory of interstellar life called "panspermia" (or "transpermia"). The prospect was first proposed in the 1870s by physicists Lord Kelvin (British) and Hermann von Helmholtz (German).

A hundred years later, British astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe found new evidence for panspermia, traces of life in the dust of space. They also proposed that comets carry bacterial life across galaxies and protect it from radiation damage along the way because comets are largely made of water-ice.

James Lovelock's Gaia theory of the earth can be seen as complementary to the theory of panspermia, or vice versa, I don't know. In any case, it's intriguing to think of the earth as a living being in its own right, and more so if we accept that it's "life" was seeded from space.

Let's summarize. We have an eternal, infinite universe that contains the building blocks of life. Life on earth was seeded from somewhere in that infinite, eternal universe. Given this, there's no reason not to believe that many other life forms exist in many other parts of the universe. But are they "intelligent?"

The very question is posed in such a way that it once again anthropomorphizes our consideration of possibilities. Why? Because it's altogether possible that we humans are an integral part of a pervasive, self-perpetuating, cosmic intelligence, i.e., Cosmic Gaia, in which elemental life is transported via comets throughout the universe, making course corrections as the universe expands and contracts and planetary bodies form and are destroyed.

The universe exists in a state of homeostasis, forever and always. The intelligence necessary for that to happen has existed and will exist forever and ever. Right now, we are part of it. Some day, we'll be replaced. Our replacements will be wearing their socks wrong side out.

Intelligent Life, Revisited

In an earlier post I discussed terrestrial organisms, i.e., life forms on earth, living in extremely hostile environments. Our conception of where life can exist has been expanded dramatically as a result of deep sea explorations, for example, where scientists were astounded to discover giant tube worms thriving at 8000 ft at hydrothermal vents leaking scalding, acidic water. It would seem then, that extraterrestrial life becomes even more probable, because the conditions under which life can survive and even thrive have widened considerably.

Yet, when we consider the possibility of extraterrestrial life, we seem invariably to conceptualize only in terms of the self-contained organism; what I term the 'ET paradigm.'

But what if intelligent life was organized differently? What if it looked like the image below instead? This is an immunoflourescent image of a neisseria microcolony and its radiating pili. Neisseria gonorrhoeae is the bacterium that causes the infectious disease gonorrhea. Scientific studies are showing how bacteria like neisseria crawl to and exchange genes with each other. Other studies are investigating how some microbes got here to earth in the first place. Got here and perhaps, planted in and/or exchanged genes with us.

Humans are covered inside and out with bacteria. We depend on bacteria for essential functions, like digestion. Bacterial cells outnumber human cells by 10 to 1 and microbiologists believe that humans and their commensal, i.e., symbiotic, bacteria are continually adapting to one another genetically. In some sense, we humans are a kind of superstructure for a microbial colony. But that's not really what I mean to convey. I see humans as an integral part of an organic membrane that stretches across the universe, from one end to another in space-time. I'll say more about this later, when I discuss space traveling bacteria.